After the 101 Tokyo opening last night (and before the 102 Tokyo Art opening), Jean Snow, Brad D., and I stopped into a Suehirocho Mickey Ds to eat some eco-unfriendly and inexpensive food-units. (Have you tried this “Big” Mac thing they have? It’s huge!)

We were seated next to a conspiciously-filthy group of vagrant-looking older Japanese men and women, who were drifting in and out of sleep and looked to have been camping out in those seats for the entire Fukuda prime minister-ship. Suddenly, the younger woman of this collective pulls out an enormous needle, and as we were fleeing, administered the older guy of the group an insulin shot as he laid down.

Needles and vagrants at a McDonalds? What is this — New York? I am not going to extrapolate this one anecdote into proof of Japanese economic collapse, but I almost feel like Tokyo’s less pleasant underbelly is starting to stick out a bit more, especially in downtown areas. The clerks are still perky young nationals, but the Japanese fast food environment may possibly be on its way to becoming as unpredictable as in other countries.

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“The clerks are still perky young nationals, but the Japanese fast food environment may possibly be on its way to becoming as unpredictable as in other countries.”

I’m not going to share the unpleasant details, but I saw worse than this at a Shinjuku Mickey D’s in 2001 and a pretty bad scene in a Shibuya one in 2002…. Things have been going downhill for a while. I like living in the inaka….

Personally, I’ve seen the same scene in the basement of the MCD’s by Akasaka Mitsuke station and at another in Ikebukuro. The common thread is the 24 hour shops, and the fact that those squatting are likely someone’s grandparents. I guess 850 yen an hour isn’t enough to get the staff to hassle them enough to leave.

New York doesn’t have many druggies hanging around McDonald’s and other fast food joints. I’ve seen some wierd people at Dunkin Donuts cursing at the wall then deciding to take their shirt off and do push-ups on Chambers St., but not nothing serious. New York’s cleaned up a lot since the early 90′s.